Product Information

Publisher's Description

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TheTriumph of Faith explodes the myth that people around the world are abandoning religion. Stark marshals an incredible amount of datasurveys of more than a million people in 163 nationsto paint the full picture that both scholars and popular commentators have missed. He explains why the astonishing growth of religion is happening, and what it means for our future.

Starks lively, eye-opening book is full of insights that defy the conventional wisdom. He reveals:

&bull; Why Islam is not overtaking Christianity &bull; 81 percent of people around the world claim to belong to an organized religious faith &bull; Half of the people around the world attended a worship service in the past week &bull; Despite all the attention paid to the "New Atheists," atheists remain few, anywhere &bull; Latin America has never been so Catholicand thats because there are now so many Protestants there &bull; Of all the great world religions, only Buddhism may not be growing

As Stark shows, secularists have been predicting the imminent demise of religion for centuries. It is their unshakeable faith in secularization that may be the most "irrational" of all.

Author Bio

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Rodney Stark is the award-winning author of How the West Won, The Victory of Reason, The Rise of Christianity, Gods Battalions, and many other books. He serves as Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University, where he is co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion. Stark is the former president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Before earning his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a staff writer for several major publications. Starks books have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Turkish.

"Rodney Stark is one of Americas preeminent scholars of religion. . . . Often controversial, a slayer of historical myths." Patheos

"Bracing, rollicking, startling, belligerent, informative, and guaranteed to provoke second and third thoughts about what readers thought they always knew about religion." First Things

"Giants are rare in any day. . . . [But] maybe we do have giants . . . for example, Rodney Stark. . . . He continually throws the discipline of sociology of religion into chaos." Andrew M. Greeley, University of Chicago